


Second-Hand Revenge

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Amaram is a jerk no matter what universe, Bridge Four Beach Party, But that's okay because Renarin is here to set things right, Gen, I never would have done a Selkie AU if it hadn't been requested, Renarin Kholin Gift Exchange Entry, Renarin tries, Revenge, Selkies, but now that I've written it I'm glad, selkie Renarin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 20:52:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13443177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Renarin gets revenge on Kaladin's behalf. Selkie AU.





	Second-Hand Revenge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NothingRiddikulus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NothingRiddikulus/gifts).



> This was written for the Renarin Kholin Gift Exchange for EviKholin on Tumblr. They requested a Selkie AU, so here goes.

The waves swished over the rocky shore like a lady’s dress dragging across the ground. Every time it surged up the beach, Renarin’s little pile of barnacle-encrusted boulders became an island in the surf, cutting him off from the other beachgoers. He liked the rythmic sound of each wave crashing into the boulders and hissing over the smaller stones that made up the rest of the beach as it retreated back into the sea. It was loud, almost loud enough to completely drown out the sound of Lopen arguing with Rock over the exact definition of ‘inedible.’ 

His sealskin was somewhere back up the beach, on one of the logs people used as benches, but he wasn’t worried. His father could worry all he wanted, there was no danger of anything happening to it while he was with his friends. None of them would ever take it from him the way Dalinar had taken Renarin’s mother’s back before all the AA meetings. 

The sun was falling, but it was summer; there was still plenty of time before the sun finally got around to melting into the sea. A fantastic column of light connected the sun’s reflection to some distant point on the horizon. The water shone so brilliantly that Renarin had to look away. He focused on the sound of the water instead.

“Hey Renarin! Hurry up and get over here, the food’s almost done!”

Renarin startled; he’d been so focused on the sound of the water, it had taken him a second to notice any other sounds. He waved in acknowledgement and stood up on wobbly legs. Pins and needles spiked across the sole of his foot as the blood in his legs started pumping properly again.

“Watch your step, by the way. No one likes cleaning sand out of a cut.” Kaladin shouted from his position on the bleached driftwood semicircle everyone was gathering around. 

His face didn’t change, but inside he winced. Kaladin didn’t mean it like that. He’d have said the same thing to any other member of their friend group; he was a mother hen like that. Besides, lots of people told Renarin to be careful; he should be used to it by now.

He swung a leg down into the surf. The water surged over his bare feet, making the smaller pebbles shift and skitter. It was a bit of a reach from his ledge to the ground, but it was manageable. Or it would have been, if his oversized pants hadn’t gotten caught on a patch of barnacles, pulling him up short before he actually landed. He caught himself on the ledge he’d been sitting on, but his leg skidded over another barnacle patch. Blood immediately welled to the surface and curled into the clear water.

Perfect. That’s what he got for being annoyed at an innocent ‘watch your step,’ he guessed. 

The water wiped away the blood as soon as it reached the surface, but as soon as he made it to the beach proper there was no way to hide it. Light tendrils of red dripped down to his ankles, leaving liquid tracks down his shin. A single drop wobbled on his ankle bone. 

No one seemed to have noticed his slip, but there was no hiding the blood. He steeled himself for some sort of ‘I told you so.’ Good thing Adolin wasn’t here, or he’d never hear the end of it. 

Kaladin noticed first, but all he did was hop up and start rummaging through his bag. “I’ve got band-aids in here somewhere,” he muttered. “Sit down, I’ll be right over.”

“Hey, why do the sea monsters only attack Renarin?” Lopen loudly complained. “It’s hardly fair that he’s the only one who gets a crack at them. Ladies like wounds like that,” he said in his best dramatic storyteller voice. “It’s romantic. Makes you wonder what the other guy looks like.”

Lyn swatted him with her towel. “What do you know about what ladies like?”

“Considering the other guy was a barnacle, he probably looks a good deal better than I do.” Renarin said softly. It looked like he’d gotten all worked up over nothing. Sometimes he forgot that his father and Adolin were such worrywarts.

Lopen nodded sagely. “The dreaded barnacles. They get us all eventually.”

Sigzil rolled his eyes and scooted over to make room for Renarin. “Let Kaladin treat that glorious wound of yours. And don’t get blood on my shoes, okay? That stuff doesn’t come out easy.”

Kaladin made a noise of triumph and surfaced from his search with a water bottle, some neosporin and the largest package of band-aids Renarin had ever seen. Did he just carry that thing around, waiting for someone to get hurt?

He pushed Renarin’s legs apart and knelt between them to get a closer look. Lopen opened his mouth to make what was surely a dirty joke, but Drehy threw a bottle of sunscreen at him before he could start it. 

“Don’t be tasteless, Lopen. Kaladin and sex just don’t go together, you know that.”

Lopen threw his head back dramatically. “Oh ye of little faith! The Lopen can make a better joke than that!”

“Could you roll up your pants for me so I can see were the cuts start?” Kaladin interrupted. 

Renarin bent down and dutifully rolled up the pant leg. The bleeding had slowed to almost nothing, but the semi-dry tracks that stretched down to his foot still made it look terrible. Kaladin just poured some of the water out over it, washing the excess blood away. Then he began methodically rubbing neosporin in thick swaths over the cuts. Once that was done, he began applying a collage of different colored band-aids. The cuts ranged all down his shins, so by the time Kaladin was done his leg was more band-aid than skin.

Now he just had to wear either his sealskin or long pants until the cuts healed. His dad would never have to know.

The beach party dragged long into the night. Rock had brought enough food to feed a college dorm for a week, and there was plenty of driftwood to keep the bonfire going. Renarin put on his sealskin a few times and played one-on-everybody-else beachball from the water until the sun finally went down and no one could see him properly. 

As things began to wind down, however, a rowdy, brightly-lit powerboat passed by. A man sat on the front deck, laughing with a young lady with perfectly styled hair. Kaladin took one look at the boat and began to pack his things. 

“It’s dark guys, we should go.”

Sigzil looked between Kaladin and the powerboat, then sighed and started helping everyone else locate their things. Within minutes the bonfire was doused and everyone was shining their phone flashlights around looking for the trail back to the parking lot.

Renarin shot Lyn a look, but she looked just as lost. 

He hated not knowing what was going on. What was up with Kaladin? He’d never seen him react so coldly and automatically to anything. Kaladin had even taken Renarin’s  _ I’m a selkie yes the ones from the myths no I’m not going to disappear into the sea  _ revelation with a completely even keel. Seeing him like this was unsettling. 

Sigzil seemed like he knew, though, and Renarin had already developed a tried and true method to get information out of him. He positioned himself directly in Sigzil’s line of sight and made as over-the-top a confused face as he could. Sigzil turned his head to look at the empty, impenetrable forest instead. Renarin shifted into his field of vision again and redoubled his efforts to look confused.

Finally, the man broke.

“Kaladin’s fine. He just really hates that man and that particular boat.”

“Why though? I was under the impression Kaladin didn’t hate anything but injustice and income inequality.”

Sigzil slowed a bit, letting Kaladin’s bobbing phone light get a little further ahead. 

“That man’s name is Amaram, and a few years ago he ran Kaladin and his little brother over in that powerboat when they were paddleboarding in the harbor. Kaladin made it, but his little brother wasn’t all that strong a swimmer, and got cut up pretty bad by the motor. Amaram denied that there was ever an accident, though, and called Kaladin a liar. Trouble is, a bunch of Kaladin’s friends saw the whole thing, and it looked like the whole thing might actually go to court. But then one day, all of those witnesses just disappeared, and the charges were dropped. Which is funny, since Kaladin never dropped them.” 

He spit into the forest. “That man’s scum, through and through, but he’s rich and powerful scum. He’s never gonna face any consequences.”

Renarin thought back to the boat in question and tried to cement the image in his mind. 

Perhaps there was something he could do.

  
  
  


Renarin glared up from just beneath the water. Amaram stood near the edge of the dock, gesturing animatedly and laughing facetiously. A wave of hatred shuddered through him. So this was the man who’d killed Kaladin’s little brother out of carelessness. Had he not been fuming since yesterday, he might not even have noticed one more fake-laughing man in clean white pants and expensive boat shoes among the group sitting and drinking around a large powerboat. But in his current state of mind he latched onto Amaram’s presence and began to worry at it like a dog with a bone.

Realistically, he knew there wasn’t a whole lot that he could do. Amaram was nigh-untouchable, infuriating as that may be. Rich, solid gold reputation, no evidence of fowl play hard enough to hold up in court. The man had nothing to worry about.

However, Renarin was willing to accept second-rate revenge as well.

He dove down under the dock long enough to compose himself, then floated lazily up to the surface. He popped his head up just feet from the dock and gave a full body shake to get the attention of the people on the dock. 

The coos and shrieks hit him like an avalanche. It was all so  _ loud  _ and _ shrill _ . For a few heartbeats, he simply froze up before the painful rush of sensation. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be when he had his sealskin on! It was supposed to be cool and calm, just water rushing over his skin and the quiet  _ laplaplap _ of the harbor buoys bobbing. 

He shook himself again. He couldn’t get distracted now! This was his chance. He looked directly up at the mob of shrieking people on the dock, taking care to make his eyes big and cute as he searched for a particular face. 

Amaram was kneeling at the edge of the group, where he could make the appropriate comments without losing his dignity getting pushed aside by the more eager members of the dock party. 

Renarin twisted onto his side and glided past the tittering onlookers, timing it so that he slowed as he neared Amaram’s side of the group. Then, in a burst of speed, he pounced.

The first powerful lunge propelled his body up onto the edge of the dock. Water sloshed up with him, making a puddle that rapidly consumes Amaram’s clean, white-soled boat shoes. Before he lost his momentum he whipped his head to the side and grabbed Amaram’s clean white pants in his mouth. He spared an extra second to secure his grip before collapsing backwards into the harbor, pulling Amaram with him, wine glass and all.

He felt a sharp, tugging pain, but ignored it as he pulled away from Amaram’s wildly flailing limbs. It was the man’s own buoyancy more than his desperate attempts to swim while fully clothed that brought him sputtering back up to the surface. The broken wine glass sunk to the bottom, along with one of his boat shoes. Renarin floated several meters away to watch him spit out water and curse. Eventually he got his act together enough to swim to the docks, where some of the other party goers helped pull him up. Once he was out of the water, Renarin slipped soundlessly under the surface and swum away.

He didn’t notice the problem immediately, but it grew more and more obvious as he swam. His body felt slower, like it was being weighed down somehow. He could always feel the water gliding over his seal skin, but the more he concentrated on it the more it felt like there was water on his human skin as well. 

As it grew harder and harder to swim, he looked around for a place to beach himself. Rock’s house was around here somewhere- he could go there. 

He started getting cold, and that terrified him more than anything else. He was never cold in his sealskin. When he rose to the surface for air, it scraped painfully against his throat, as if he’d just finished running around the track a couple of times. When he finally reached the beach, he collapsed and peeled himself out of the sealskin as quickly as possible so he could figure out what was wrong with it. It came off easy, but it felt heavier than it should. Like it had been filled with seawater.

He stared at it in horror. It was ripped! Amaram’s broken wine glass had left a long, sinuous slash in his sealskin. 

He disentangled himself from the sealskin and laid back in the water with a groan. He couldn’t go back home like this. His father would blow the whole thing way out of proportion. Besides he could only imagine having to explain how the whole thing had come about.  _ ‘I only meant to  _ lightly _ drown him!’ _ Sure, that would go over well.

He tried to listen to the sound of waves rushing over rocks instead of the sound of his racing heart. He was unsuccessful. He should probably dump the water out of the skin, but it felt pointless. It was already salty, and pouring out the water wouldn’t fix that.

He needed to fix this, preferably quickly. But how? 

Later, Renarin would say that Kaladin descended from the sky, dramatically and with perfect posture, glowing and ready to rescue him. Kaladin would say that he didn’t descend, it just looked that way because Renarin was on his back, that he had to stand like that because he was on a stand-up paddle board and he didn’t want to tip over, and that he wasn’t glowing, it was just the sun in Renarin’s eyes. 

“If you don’t move soon, the tide’s gonna come in and cover your face.”

“I did something stupid.”

Kaladin grunted and plopped down next to him. He looked pointedly at the sealskin. “You’ve done stupid things before. I’m sure this isn’t as bad as “battling” all those crabs where your father could see.”

“Those crabs were on the rampage, I had to.” He grinned. Kaladin laughed.

“I believe you. Now, does whatever you did really top hearing Dalinar honest to goodness lecture you about the dangers of angry crabs?”

“I ripped my sealskin.” He held it up for Kaladin’s inspection. “Tore right through it. There’s no way he won’t find out about this one.”

Kaladin rolled his eyes. “Well if that’s all, then there’s no problem. I can fix it.”

Renarin sat bolt upright. “ _ Really? _ ”

“Of course. I’m training to be a surgeon; I’ve got to know how to make neat, precise stitches. I can just sew it up. Then we can run it through the washing machine to get rid of the salt.”

Renarin laid back down and laughed. The tide had risen high enough to cover his ears when he laid down, and he could hear the roar of the rising ocean. “Thanks.”

Kaladin grunted and stood in lieu of a reply. After helping Renarin to his feet, he grabbed his paddle board and started up towards Rock’s house. Renarin paused to dump the seawater out of his sealskin, then ran after him. Now that he wasn’t feeling quite so gloomy, he realised he hadn’t told Kaladin exactly how he’d ripped it in the first place.


End file.
